{shortcode-a16c2a7582a0280ba8c79b8a93a67df8feeaabe7}

Four Harvard College seniors — Kashish Bastola ’26, Hannah W. Duane ’26, Tenzin R. Gund-Morrow ’26, and Ashwin H. Sivakumar ’26 — and one Harvard alumna, Tomi Siyanbade ’24, were named as Marshall Scholars, the British consulate in Boston announced Tuesday.

This year, Harvard had the most winners out of the 31 American universities that produced Marshall Scholars, followed by three from Columbia University.

Harvard’s five recipients were among 43 selected from more than 1,000 applicants to the Marshall Scholarship this year. They will begin their studies in the United Kingdom next fall.

The scholarship, established in 1953 to memorialize United States Secretary of State and General George C. Marshall after World War II, awards recipients with fully funded graduate study at any university in the United Kingdom.

Duane, a joint Social Studies and Philosophy concentrator from Currier House, will study political theory and political science under a M.Phil. at the University of Oxford.

A transfer student from Deep Springs College, a two-year liberal arts college in Eastern California with less than 30 undergraduates, Duane is interested in continuing her studies of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the public sphere, and political disagreement.

“I also am really interested in the teaching mission of universities, what good teaching looks like, and the role of universities in public life, which I think is something we’re also being asked to think really seriously about right now,” said Duane, a former Crimson Magazine editor.

Duane has served on multiple committees appointed by Harvard administrators to tackle the political crisis that has embroiled the University for the past two years, working as a research assistant for Harvard’s presidential task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias and a member of the Intellectual Vitality Student Advisory Board. She said the Marshall Scholarship is her “call to continue to think seriously about civil disagreement and cooperation and trying to learn from people and work alongside people who are different from you.”

“I think Harvard gets a lot of bad press for not being a space for good civil disagreement. What I really disagree with about that press is that I don’t think that Harvard students are fragile flowers who will drop away at the first sign of disagreement,” Duane said.

“I think there could be more work to be done in getting students in spaces where questions about which we might and do reasonably disagree are asked in ways that aren’t inflammatory, and instead invite people to think seriously about what they think,” she added.

Sivakumar, an Integrative Biology concentrator in Currier House, plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Cambridge. He learned on Nov. 21 that he received the Marshall as he flew home from San Francisco, where he had interviewed for the scholarship earlier that day.

He is interested in the emergence of genetic diversity among cichlids, a family of tropical fish, in Lake Malawi in East Africa, across a short time span. He hopes his findings will help him understand what makes different cichlid species more able to adapt to environmental change.

Sivakumar — who is known on campus for his love of bird-watching — said he believes that communicating scientific findings can convey “this essentially narrative value that is really important for resolving the distance that we feel from the environments around us.”

At Cambridge, Sivakumar said he hopes to observe how scientists interact with the public and the government — and bring some of those lessons home to the U.S.

“American science is currently in an existential crisis because the public is broadly skeptical towards the value that science holds, and it’s up to us to find ways to figure out what went wrong,” Sivakumar said.

He calls himself “a product of the Currier House dhalls.”

“My ability to talk and think about myself in these ways was forged there,” he added.

Siyanbade, who concentrated in Molecular and Cellular Biology, will attend the University of Oxford for a D.Phil. in Clinical Medicine. Her senior thesis, which examined cost-effective diagnostic tests for Lassa fever, received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, which recognizes “outstanding scholarly work or research” by undergraduates.

Siyanbade served as an undergraduate researcher for the Sabeti Lab at the Broad Institute, a biomedical research center jointly sponsored by Harvard and MIT, where she focused on public health in Senegal and developed an educational textbook for Covid-19 outbreak response.

Her research interests include vaccine development and distribution, as well as pandemic response infrastructure.

“During the pandemic, seeing the fact that 99 percent of the continent of Africa’s vaccines were imported, I just felt like that’s a ridiculous number,” Siyanbade said. “That’s a ridiculous dependence that was had on all these external sources.”

She also interned at PBS during college, where she helped create a documentary for the channel’s Roadtrip Nation series.

Gund-Morrow, a Social Studies concentrator from Kirkland House and current president of the Institute of Politics, hopes to pursue a Master in Public Policy at the University of Oxford and a Master of Science in Regional and Urban Planning Studies from the London School of Economics.

He said his upbringing in New York City — during the era of stop-and-frisk, which allowed New York Police Department officers to question and search anyone they deemed suspicious — led to his interest in the interactions between public safety, housing, and urban planning.

“I very vividly remember just after Eric Garner was killed by the New York Police Department,” he added. He said that “making safety a more equitable concern in the United States has always been front of mind.”

For Gund-Morrow, that means examining how better housing policy can keep cities and their residents safer. In the U.K., he hopes to learn from 1990s-era policies that provided supportive housing, education, and employment training to homeless or unemployed youth.

“I really want to continue researching that and how we can take lessons from the United Kingdom and bring them back to the United States,” he said.

Gund-Morrow credited Setti Warren — who served as IOP director from 2022 until his sudden death in November — for helping guide him through the process.

“I drafted all the emails to thank my recommenders, before even realizing that I actually can’t even email my mentor, Setti Warren,” Gund-Morrow said. “I just hope he hears my gratitude from the other side.”

Bastola is a History concentrator living in Eliot House. He is particularly interested in Cold War-era Tibetan resistance to China, the subject of his senior thesis, and hopes to further his archival research at the University of Oxford, where he will pursue a master’s degree in history with a focus on military history and migrant labor.

Outside of academics, Bastola helps run Harvard CIVICS, mentors for PBHA Harmony, and serves on the Radcliffe Institute Student Advisory Board.

Bastola says he has been “guided by this curiosity and interest in storytelling” throughout his academic and extracurricular experiences.

“I think that for me I don’t see academics, like research, and public service or public-facing work as so separate,” Bastola said. “My interest in being a historian comes from my interest in storytelling.”

As a Marshall Scholar, Bastola said he hopes to think of himself as not just an ambassador for the U.S. but also for “the communities that have raised me and helped me get to where I am today.”

All five of the recipients described the Marshall Scholarship as both an honor and a responsibility.

“To be heard by the committee and to be affirmed, in a way, is really comforting when it comes to the fact that people believe in what I actually want to do with my life,” Siyanbade said. “It’s not just necessarily a pipe dream — folks believe in the vision that I have.”

Correction: December 10, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Kashish Bastola ’26’s senior thesis centered around the Himalayan diaspora in the U.S. In fact, Bastola’s thesis is about Tibetan resistance to China during the Cold War.